Science Fiction Studies

#40 = Volume 13, Part 3 = November 1986

Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

Twenty-Two Answers and Two Postscripts: An
Interview with Stanislaw Lem

Translated by Marek Lugowski.

The present interview was conducted in
writing, following conversations that I had with Lem in Vienna in May of 1985
and a year-long correspondence that surrounded them. Our original plan had been
to converse with the help of a Polish-English interpreter. But when I arrived in
Vienna, no appropriate interpreter was available. Lem had no desire to speak for
the record in English or, through a third-language interpreter, in German or
French. With the help of Dr. Franz Rottensteiner's able mediation from German,
and Lem's own quite competent English, Lem and I did manage to discuss many of
the things that later formed the basis of the interview. We agreed that the
ideal format would be for me to submit my questions in English, to which he
would reply in writing, in Polish. I think both of us preferred this format
anyway, since it minimized the loss of information. The result was the 22
replies and 2 postscripts of the present interview, which I have annotated with
Dr. Rottensteiner's assistance.

ICR:
You are highly regarded as a writer of both fiction and "experimental"
philosophy of science. You use fictional elements in your philosophical works,
and philosophical-essayistic elements in your fictions. What distinguishes these
two modes for you? Why don't you "specialize" in one or the other?

Lem:
All my books, both the belletristic and the discursive in nature, were written
spontaneously—that is, choosing the mode of expression that seemed most
appropriate to me because it made me write. Aside from essays, I also wrote
three discursive books (Summa Technologiae, Dialogues, and Science
Fiction and Futurology—I forgot about the fourth one, The Philosophy of
Chance), and there is nothing fantastic about them. Because when beginning
to write each of these books I had neither a plan nor any kind of knowledge of
their content, they basically got written unaffected by any genological or
taxonomic considerations; that is, I did not spend any time thinking about the
questions of what genre they are meant to belong to. These books contain a lot
of speculation and I am aware of it. This speculation could be termed sui
generis fantasizing on the themes of future development (of technology or
literature, for example), but I was merely expressing my convictions, not
intentionally setting up hypotheses. In this sense, I functioned as an unwitting
futurologist—before the futurological goldrush itself took place—and an
unwitting philosopher, too. I suppose that my inclination towards armchair
philosophizing was induced by my acquaintance with certain people who edited a
philosophical journal, for example Helen Eilstein and Leszek Kolakowski.1
Be that as it may, I never had the urge to "speak my piece" to the
world at large, as far as philosophy goes. Perhaps this disinclination comes
from my conviction that the time of crafting seamless, unified philosophical
systems is long past. This is so, I claim, because the results of the new
"hard" sciences, led by physics, begin to exceed the abilities of reasoning—the
various events and descriptions of states which fly in the face of visual
perception as well as any other human sense or intuition, all that stuff
conjured by the human mind. Yet the sober science marches on, registering the
"smells" and "colors" of quarks, all the while discarding
the help that we naturally owe to our bodily sensorium and lifelong personal
experience. Thus, if the scientific results exceed the horizons of human
intellectual comprehension, then human philosophy must be left behind, limiting
itself to reflection on the way the world is thoroughly known to us as a niche
for a certain thinking species or to considerations of the human position in
this world, its correctness and dangers. But as science evolves ever faster,
negating its prior solutions and pronouncements, it is futile to attempt to
create a philosophical system "once and for all," in harmony with the
effects of empirical discovery.

Issues such as these are what I packed
into my discursive works, because I was constantly fascinated and haunted by
them, and yet I saw no way of including them in my belletristic endeavors. The
fact that I did not choose one or the other (I alternated between writing
discursively and writing belletristically) basically stems from my human nature:
that of being like baking dough—my interests grew every which way at once. I
would hate to have to give up using these various strategies of relating the
themes of my life.

ICR: On
several occasions you have written that modern writing adheres to, or is
dependent on, literary paradigms derived from sacred-mythological culture
predating the rise of empiricism. Have you developed any new narrative paradigms
in your own work that are appropriate for contemporary scientific culture?

Lem:I always approached my belletristic creations pragmatically; that is, by
trial and error. In a sense, I was like a person who tries to jump as far as
possible without pausing to think about theories of jumping. This is why the
question of whether I have created any new narrative paradigms, or crossbred
some existing ones and thus benefitted from hybrid forms, or whether I made some
new headway for either Form or Content, or none at all —none of this has ever
interested me. Neither do I consider myself to be the person most competent to
answer this question of yours.

ICR:
You have been claimed by the "metafictional" school of experimental
writers in the West, yet you have often debunked and parodied the avant garde.
You describe yourself as a realist. You are obviously not a classically
realistic writer, nor a magical realist like the Latin American novelists. What
are the boundaries of Lem's realism?

Lem: Literary
realism, for me, is literature's way of dealing with the real problems of a dual
(at least) type. The first kind is the sort of problem that already exists or is
coming into existence. The second kind is the sort that appears to be lying on
the path of humanity's future. Any attempt to differentiate "possible
problems" from "fictional," or "probable situations (albeit
seeming outrageous today)" from "unlikely," is probably too
polarizing to be successful. In this field, it's every man for himself, as long
as the particular reasons for claiming the status of expert on dichotomies like
the ones cited above are more or less respectable. Thus, anyone can be a
selfmade authority on this subject, and so I am one.

I must add, however, that only recently
did I begin to believe that I must abide by this conception of literary realism
I had formulated umpteen years ago. Nor did I apprehend it consciously at first.
That is, I stuck to a sense of implied "realism," one implied through
various hypotheses which only later became apparent to me.

This ought perhaps to be qualified by
one more observation. The contemporary physicist would be surprised to learn
that, in contrast to his or her 19th-century counterpart, he or she is not a
"realist" but a "fantasist." After all, the physicist must
in some sense continue to be a realist, still working within the empirical
tradition shared with 19th-century science; he or she still converts guesses
into testable hypotheses, to be crystallized into theories which are subject to
falsification. Similarly—mutatis mutandis—my writing over the last 30
years has been subjected to tests imposed by the changing world. I dare claim
that the thrust of the main changes (such as genetic engineering or computer
science) would become apparent to me, roughly at the time when some very
intelligent people simply laughed at my notions as fairy stories. Of course, I
was quite a bit off when it came to details, but the strategic movements of
civilizations I fathomed rather well. This sort of realism may be termed sound
prognosticating. On the other hand, sheer fantasizing is characterized by its
self_impossibility (for example, no one will ever manage to travel back into the
past to beat up his or her grandfather; that, I think, is certain).

Some of my texts I would consider to be
"metafictional," for their domain is not the world directly, but
rather other texts. I would include in this category Imaginary Magnitude, The
Scene of the Crime [Wizja Lokalna],2and Perfect Vacuum. All
three refer to texts invented by me. These invented texts are not part of Perfect
Vacuum and Imaginary Magnitude (after all, the works mentioned within
them are nowhere to be found!), but The Scene of the Crime is a "novel-cum-correction"
of an existing text, i.e., the 14th Voyage of Ijon Tichy, to be found in The
Star Diaries. On the other hand, the Diaries themselves are not
metafictional. The same goes for Solaris and other titles. (Other
examples of metafiction are Provocation, "One Human Minute,"
and "The World as Holocaust."3) Readers with training in
biological sciences may be the ones in the best position to enjoy my books like His
Master's Voice, but I would shy away from drawing conclusions from this.

I do not feel that I have succeeded in
inventing paradigms "appropriate for scientific culture," because I
myself don't really know how to define "scientific culture" per
genus proximum et differentiam specificam.

ICR: The
term scientific fantasy seems paradoxical to me. How can something be both
scientific and fantastic? You are the most significant writer of scientific
fantasy writing now, at least from a literary perspective, so you must have
reflected on this. The scientific content of your work is clear, since it refers
to known scientific history and theory. How would you define the fantastic
element of your work. Can there be such a thing as a fantastic science or
fantastic mathematics?

Lem: No;
I never spent much time thinking carefully about the term "Scientific
Fantasy," because the various definitions and genological arguments meant
to divide SF from Scientific Fantasy always seemed to me so much scholastic
irrelevance, and of no benefit to either the authors or the readers. The fact
that this topic may yield doctoral dissertations (or serious scholarly papers)
is not to be doubted, but that which benefits graduate students and academics in
general does not seem to me all that important when contrasted with the scale of
human needs, labors, and dangers.

The issue of whether there can be a
fantastic mathematics or a fantastic biology depends on our willingness to
stretch the term "fantastic." From the viewpoint of l9th-century
physics, the "flavors" of elementary particles or the "magical
number" of atomic physics or qualities such as "strangeness,"
etc. are sheer fantasy. Nevertheless, some names for the newly discovered
attributes must be given, even though we realize that the particles in question
are not particles in the sense of our macro-world—i.e., they are not like
stones or billiard balls. After all, isn't a "virtual" particle—that
is, one which definitely is not; what is, is the potentiality (probability) of
its existence— something completely fantastic, according to the gospel of our
human ways. It would appear that the fantastic transmutes itself into the real
when we have no choice but to concede its existence, as was the case with the
flavor of quarks.

ICR: After
the mid-'60s, you seemed to turn to meditations on intellectual genius working
at the limit of given possibilities of thought. I am thinking of the
mathematician Hogarth in His Master's Voice, Testa in "The New
Cosmogony," Professor Dobbs in "Non Serviam," Golem XIV, and so
on. This parallels your move away from dramatic-novelistic fiction, in which
your scientist-protagonist is searching for an answer, and towards the more
ironic metafictions of A Perfect Vacuum, Imaginary Magnitude, Provocation, etc.
As you leave Kelvin, Rohan, and Pirx behind, you create geniuses. Undoubtedly,
there are purely literary reasons for this. But aren't there personal ones also?
Aren't your geniuses attempts at autobiography? Doesn't this interest in the
psychology and sociology of intellectual genius reflect your own
self-exploration?

Lem:
An affirmative answer to this question is possible, although it would be merely
speculative. It was not my premeditated intention to show off the geniuses of
humankind. What happened was that because of the great weight of the problems
that I took on in the texts you mention, it became necessary to stock the
problem-solving with the best minds available to the society. Thus the choice of
the problem at hand dictated the choice of protagonist, not the other way
around. The protagonist genius had to be employed in the same sense in which a
patient with a kidney ailment necessitates the presence of a urologist, not a
cobbler or a dentist. Of course, the mental life of the protagonist was all me—where
else could I have acquired the information to render it? I do know, however,
that books can be smarter than their authors, and that my geniuses such as
Hogarth were half-illusions. After all, I do not quote the mathematical works
which made Hogarth famous. All such things are decorations, theatrical props
conjuring reality.

ICR: Many
commentators have said that your ancestors are Cervantes, Swift, and Voltaire.
But your work is also rooted in the Eastern European tradition of metaphysical
fantasy. One can see the influence of Kaflka, Capek, Witkiewicz, Dostoyevsky.
Does the Eastern European reader read a different Lem than the Western reader?

Lem:
I know more or less how the critics read me, but I know nothing about how I am
received by my readers, the ones who do not busy themselves with public
critiquing. My roots are at least two-fold: in belletristic writing and in hard
sciences and philosophy. To account for who influenced me, in terms of
individual writers, is a feat beyond me. I don't know how much I owe to whom. To
tell the truth, I never thought about it. I can say, however, that my attitude
as a reader to various authors has changed a lot over time. There was a time
when I admired Witkiewicz. Now, having picked up his Pozegnanie jesieni
[Farewell to Autumn, 1927] once again, I am unable to read it through. Its
philosophizing irks me now with its pretentiousness. Its baroque stylizing when
describing the spiritual now turns me off. The whole now seems to me to be the
work of a child prodigy, a snotty pupil who managed to get hold of some
lessons before his time, and made mincemeat out of them. This isn't meant to be
an objective depreciation of Witkiewicz. These are simply my current views on
the subject.

I haven't read Kafka for a long time,
because there is something in his works that I find repugnant. It's as if they
contained more misfortune than is "proper" for a "decent"
author. It's as if Kafka struggled with both some real forces and some that were
but his own, personal, desperate neuroses; and I despise writer-psychopaths.

Of Dostoyevsky's works, only Crime
and Punishment was compelling enough to make me come back to it. As for The
Brothers Karamazov and The Possessed, I was unable to read them
again. A single pass was entirely sufficient; why, I don't know.

I also cooled off in my admiration of
Thomas Mann, with the possible exception The Magic Mountain and some
other novels. Also, Capek was a genius who often squandered his talent. His Absolute
at Large goes to pieces in its latter half. I respect Joseph Conrad,
preferring his short stories to LordJim and
Nostromo. I am, overall, not a studious reader of belletristic
literature. I can't say why. I used to love Voltaire, Diderot, and Swift. Lately
I tend to return to well-known poetry instead (Slowacki, Leimian, R.M. Rilke).

ICR:
On the same subject, we can narrow things even more, from Eastern Europe in
general to Poland in particular. You have the reputation of being one of the
most inventive Polish stylists. You are, I know, familiar with some of your
translations into Russian, English, German, and French. Is there a specifically
Polish dimension to your work that is lost when it is translated?

Lem: Certainly,
in some of my texts there are messages peculiarly meaningful to Poles. It would
be amazing if there were none. However, a work such as Edukocja Cyfrania [The
Schooling of Cyfran],4 containing such a message, has never been
successfully translated. The building material for my writing is the Polish
language, and I think that I have succeeded in exploiting many of its
idiosyncrasies (not shared by non-Slavic languages), not only but largely in
neologisms carrying poignant and grotesque content. The translations of my works
always depended on the inventiveness of my translators; and my best two are, I
think, the late I. Zimmermann-Gollheim (German) and M. Kandel (English). Ms
Zimmermann-Gollheim succeeded in translating remarkably literally, whereas Mr
Kandel has given himself a lot of interpretative latitude, replacing that which
he was unwilling or unable to retain with that which was equivalent in English
on some higher semantic plane.

ICR:
You are famous for your neologisms—which somehow, miraculously, lend
themselves to translations. You have even included a Polish-Polish dictionary at
the end of one of your books. Do your neologisms and linguistic play come before
your ideas for action, setting up the boundaries of how you develop your
stories? Or do the neologisms come to you when you need them?

Lem: Neologisms
happen to come up only when they become absolutely indispensable to me during
the course of writing. I am unable to think up one that would carry meaning if
asked to work outside of context, sui generic. I really have no clue as
to how this process works. Some neologisms were hell to conjure. For example, in
my latest book, Fiasco, I couldn't hit upon a name for the walking
machines, and for two years they were nameless. I tried to think up a derivative
of Latin, and then English, but to no avail. I finally settled, in Polish, on
"wielkochody" (multisteppers, macromobils).

lCR: Kafka's
influence seems strong in your work. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Solaris, and
"The Mask" especially lend themselves to being read as variations on
Kafka's themes. Do you view yourself as an heir of Kafka's?

Lem: No,
I do not consider myself the "heir" or "descendant" of
Kafka. Kafka, like God, would have to have been invented if he weren't around.
Certainly Kafka was a stage in my development, but as I have already said, I am
neither awed by him nor, a fortiori, enamored of him.

ICR: And
Capek? You don't invoke his name often, but there are suggestive affinities. I'm
thinking of the robot fables, and the Ijon Tichy-like situations of The
Absolute at Large and The War with the Newts.

Lem:
I read Capek as a teenager. The War with the Newts is just as messed up
in construction as The Absolute at Large. And though I think that Capek
conjured somewhat defective items, they were entirely original in thought and
vision (his genius can be seen in the very design of The Absolute at Large).
I like his Apokrify and many other stories (for example, Tales
from Two Pockets). Above all, Capek is a very Czech writer, moderate,
humorous, and considerably laidback or phlegmatic, just the qualities which, in
this combination, Poles rather lack.

ICR:
While we are on the subject of influence, let me ask you about Pascal. I feel
the presence of Pascal in your work as much as that of Wiener, Shannon, and
Turing. Jarzebski has described the sense of claustrophobia in your fiction as
if the limitless space of the cosmos were merely a backdrop concealing a hidden
reality. (E.g., personoids are "trapped" in the artificial space of
the personetic computer programs in "Non Serviam"; earthly humanity
remains in ignorance of the Senders in His Master's Voice, and of the
Cosmic Game Players in "The New Cosmogony," and of the higher realms
of intelligence in Golem XIV.) Your fascination with the silentium
universi seems to recapitulate Pascal's fascination with the limitless
universe and the problem of the hidden god that will not make itself manifest in
its creation. Pascal is also one of the founders of the theory of probability
that informs so much of your writing. In a sense, your works can be read as
ambivalent satires on Pascal. Is this a coincidence of intellectual history, or
did you read Pascal with a sense of recognition?

Lem:
I read about Pascal, but I don't think I ever read him. I suppose that my heavy
reading in the biological sciences takes its toll in the form of my ignorance of
some excellent writers. As for claustrophobia, I don't feel any. I am aware that
a certain Polish writer (Henna Malewska), upon reading my Memoirs Found in a
Bathtub, asked my friend and writer Jan Josef Szczepanski whether I suffer
from paranoia. I don't. I am psychologically normal, but I can conjure an aura
of claustrophobia or agoraphobia, if needed, in my writing.

ICR: You've
said that you have been deeply influenced by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor and
Underground Man. Yet the ethical dilemmas you depict seem very different from
those facing Dostoyevsky's protagonists. How do you assess Dostoyevsky's
influence on your writing?

Lem: Notes from Underground is probably
the work of Dostoyevsky's that has impinged intellectually the most on my
perceptions. On the other hand, I was unable even to pay attention to a lot of
his other writings, because of their feel, and so reading them was a torture (A
Raw Youth, The Brothers Karamazov, The Possessed). However, the tale of the
Grand Inquisitor and the aforementioned Notes from Underground will stay
with me. As for Dostoyevsky as a person, to judge from his correspondence,
diaries, and the remembrances of his wife Anna, I can't stand him. He was a
veritable brilliant Russian-Nationalist monster, par excellence.

ICR: In
Science Fiction and Futurology, you wrote that no one has developed
Stapledon's method of creating cultures. Many of my students, who read your
novels immediately after reading Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star
Maker, saw your work as a dialogue with Stapledon. They read your alien
encounters as intense dramatic depictions of the same subject matter that
Stapledon describes with epic expansiveness. Did Stapledon's imaginary cosmogony
have an effect on your "dramas of cognizance"?

Lem: Most
likely, my reading of Stapledon provided plenty of inspiration for my
imagination, especially from the sociological point of view (the variety of
cultures and the magnitude of their separateness). I think I can say that to me
he is in that select group of authors known as true eye-openers. Still, purely
belletristically, I can point to many flaws in his writing, as I have done in my
Science Fiction and Futurology, especially in his Odd John.

ICR: In
your polemic against Todorov, you brought up the example of Borges as a
fantasist of the abstract. You wrote that Todorov's conception of the fantastic
(as the description of phenomena that cannot be determined to be natural or
supernatural) ignores fantastic modeling, or fantasy on the level of models.
Given the fascination that gorges' work and your own hold, doesn't this fantasy
on the level of models imply that our age is more obsessed with model-generating
than any previous age? And isn't your conception of realism in fact the mimesis
of model construction?

Lem: Of
course, one could regard my many works as models of certain situations—alternatively,
as situations that are models of the problems most interesting to me, situations
that showcase these problems best. There are "models of nothing,"
built by pure mathematics. The notion of modeling is now very commonplace,
thanks to computer science, because that which cannot be calculated directly can
often be modeled (simulated) with computer—for example, the formation of
galaxies. This modeling is now a necessity in many distinct and divergent
fields, and in this sense our age is more obsessed with model-generating than
times past were.

ICR: Much
recent work in the speculative philosophy of science has connected the new
scientific paradigms with Asian philosophy. I'm alluding to Prigogine, Fritjof
Capra, and others. Even one of your own characters at the end of His Master's
Voice offers a quasi-Hindu cosmology in which the universe is periodically
destroyed and resurrected. Still, most of your work hinges on the effect of new
knowledge on culturally established ethics and ethical self-conceptions—reflecting
the "deconstructive" effect of scientific thought on humanistic
ethics, the problem of good and evil, etc. Why have you not taken up the
question of the duality of being and non-being, so attractive to many
contemporary philosophers of science and so central to Asian philosophy?

Lem: My
knowledge of the philosophy of the Far East is strictly second hand. That is,
contrary to the case with Western philosophy, I have never had a textbook on Far Eastern
philosophy in my hand. Therefore, my knowledge in this area is fragmentary,
uncertain, and thus rather haphazard. Being rather strongly tied to empiricism,
I feel quite distant from the Far Eastern speculations. For instance, I value
Schopenhauer a great deal, but I like his Eastern influences the least. As for
contemporary philosophy of science, I consider Capra's ideas silly, whereas I
love Prigogine's—his are priceless discoveries. On the other hand, Prigogine's
popular fare does not impress me at all. I draw a very clear line between that
which the scientist accomplishes in his or her field from that which the
scientist says about it (even more so when he or she speaks on other issues!).

ICR:
You once wrote to me that you believe a lot of what Golem says. His speculations
on the "toposophy" of Superior Artificial Intelligences can be read as
a materialistic version of theosophy—a theosophy without a teleology. The
development of intelligence described by Golem seems to parallel the development
of "spiritual consciousness" projected by Teilhard, the Austrian
mystic Rudolph Steiner, and others in the modern Western mystical tradition.
Despite your stated dislike of mysticism and of Hegel, aren't you describing a
dialectical progress of the Spirit of Intelligence in Golem's vision?

Lem: It
is not one and the same to me that someone should promise people that humans
will fly because they'll grow wings—like angels—or promise them, as Roger
Bacon did, that they will fly because they will build appropriate machines. This
is why I put some faith in the conceptualizations of Golem, as they can be
extrapolated from real successes of computer science, cybernetics, and automata
theory. On the other hand, the writings of Teilhard de Chardin are to me but an
attempt at crossing theology with biology, harmful to both.

To me, Steiner is just a flake. I
believe in a planet-mind, but I don't believe in bending spoons and keys as acts
of pure will—psychokinesis. And, in any case, the vision of Golem ought to be
taken cum grano salts. He himself cautions that he doesn't know but
is merely supposing. I merely supposed about his suppositions.

ICR:
You have said that philosophy's weakness vis-à-vis science is that
philosophy has no "other," no test of failure, no inherent mode of
self-correction. Doesn't your work imply that science has a weakness vis-à-vis
art? If not, why didn't you become a scientist or an engineer?

Lem: The
world-models supplied by philosophers are arbitrary, in the sense that they do
not contain appeals to some decisive factor in favor of a given proposal. The
models supplied by science test themselves against reality, else the shuttle Discovery
couldn't have been flying around the planet. The scientific models do,
however, spill over the boundaries of everyday utility; but wherever they do,
they lose currency and become old and void. The products of dated technology are
anachronistic, but never become "incompatible with reality";
Stephenson's locomotive and Ford's original automobile could run today as easily
as in their heyday. On the other hand, the image of a world based on the 19th
century's atomism is outdated, discarded—indeed, incompatible with the truth.
Only in this sense can science be said to "make mistakes," and even
so, science learns from its mistakes and moves on. A newer model is not the
final one, either—that is, true once and for all.

The world-models supplied by literature
need not undergo the above process, provided that the problems under discussion
themselves do not go away. There is no way to support science with literature
and vice-versa, even though both are intellectual pursuits and tell us something
new about the world. A literature that rejects science toto in corpore borders
on the autistic, the nihilistic. Still, science and literature have incompatible
agendas. Science attempts to show that the world is such and such, that
phenomena have such and such a structure, and any questions asked of science on
these subjects elicit changing answers. Literature, on the other hand, may pose
questions that have no answers. It may pose problems that are not understood or
understandable. It may concern itself with that which may befall humans
or humanity. The boundaries of literature run at the bounds of articulated
speech (ethnic speech). The boundaries of science lie where no language, no
code, no simulation, no modeling would suffice for the purpose of posing
questions and answering them.

However, aside from living in everyday
life and seriously doing science, people may and do like to play. Science
may be a plaything and, in part, that is what my literature is.

ICR: Much
of the wit and originality of your fiction lies in the way you create
paradoxical relationships between literary and scientific models. Are there
scientific models that are completely impossible to encode in the language of
fiction? Are there scientific models that entertain you, but that you know you
cannot turn into tales?

Lem: I
would imagine that there are plenty of intriguing scientific problems par
excellence that may have trouble ending up in literature. Such troubles are
well known to me. They have caused me, among other things, departures from the
usual sorts of plot in favor of highly abbreviated fiction (A Perfect Vacuum,
Imaginary Magnitude). I also wrote (in Herr F., which exists only in
German as a publication of Suhrkamp Bibliothek) about an unsuccessful attempt of
mine to write a "contemporary Faust," and I tried to explain
there why this attempt did not work. (The protagonist was to be humanity, not an
individual—that was the problem.)

In the US there is a periodical
published by scientists and intended strictly for the cognoscenti, some
specialists. It abounds with parodies, in-jokes (mostly nonsensical), and crazy
ideas, entirely inaccessible to outsiders. I wouldn't make literature out of
such material, for although I do not especially brood about my intended
audience, I do not go around writing for some hundred souls with the requisite
knowledge of nucleonics or computer programming. Such a hermeneutics is not for
me.

lCR: Some
critics were disappointed when you abandoned the novelistic mode of the '60s and
adopted the ludic pseudo-essay mode of the imaginary reviews and introductions.
In some cases, it appeared the critics were longing for a return to a causality,
while you were exploring undecideable games.

In your recent work, however, you seem
to be returning to the narrative pattern of your earlier work. Is this how you
conceive The Scene of the Crime and Fiasco?5

Lem: Yes,
it is true that in Peace on Earth, The Scene of the Crime, and Fiasco
I have returned to plot-oriented fiction. Most likely, this return of mine—which
occurred after writing several pamphlets of the fictional review sort, though
entirely serious, such as Provocation, "One Human Minute,"
"The World as Holocaust," "Weapon Systems of the 21st
Century"6—was caused by the many contemporary global changes:
the rising antagonism between East and West, the growing reality of the Star
Wars (SDI) vision, and my personal dilemmas as a Pole. But who knows what the
reasons and motives for this return are; the foregoing is just my hypothesis.

ICR: One
of the most interesting aspects of your work is the apparent ambivalence you
feel about technological evolution. Sometimes you imply that its future is
inevitable and autonomous, but at other times you argue explicitly that some
social control must be imposed to restore the sense of value. Simone Well wrote
that the peculiarity of 20th-century Western culture is that is it is the first
civilization to have lost the consciousness of value. You yourself wrote—in
the Summa, in Science Fiction and Futurology, etc.— that our age
has endangered itself by replacing value with comfort. How do you envision the
restoration of value and social controls in the era of Star Wars?

Lem: In
a non-antagonistic world, the conquest ("domestication,"
neutralization) of technological evolution could happen, theoretically. But with
the symmetrical lack of trust according to the principle pacta sunt servanda,
each side maximizes its efforts to prevent being overtaken by the other.
This state of affairs can indeed lead to a technological foxhole. This is the
main point of my Fiasco. The factor that brings this specter about does
not pertain to science itself; it arises courtesy of the global political
situation: not just the East-West rivalry, but also the fundamentalism of
Islamic extremists. Futurologists, such as those in the Rand Corporation, have
in the past umpteen years conjured hundreds upon hundreds of political and
economic scenarios of the future paths of the world, but the mad renaissance of
Islam's aggressiveness had not been foreseen by them in any of their scenarios!

A situation has arisen necessitating an
ambivalent relationship between science and technology, as both jointly bring
forth exquisite, mortally dangerous offerings. What I write is but a reflection
of this situation. There is no universal cure for this ailment, at least I don't
see any. Aside from the continuing East-West conflict, how can one fail to
notice movements like that of Islamic fundamentalism, in the face of which,
democracy finds itself a priori at a disadvantage. This disadvantage does
not manifest itself only in terrorism; it is brought about by the very existence
of an elite of technologically rich nations. These nations are marvelous
suppliers of bombs, arms, electronics, remote-control detonators, passenger
airliners (for hijacking), and news—this status guarantees that they
are susceptible to blackmail, and guarantees that they will never be ready to
strike out in a blind massive retaliatory strike. In a word, this Islam which
has given global culture so many intellectual treasures is now turning out to be
its parasite. This situation caused me to write The Scene of the Crime.7

ICR: According
to Aquinas, the other Summalogist, Amor est magis cognitiva quam cognitio. It
is a striking characteristic of your work that you don't depict affectional
relationships among your protagonists—at least since Solaris and Return
from the Stars. Some theorists have made persuasive arguments that cognition
is inextricably tied to certain kinds of affections— and that the Western
tradition of purifying the intellect involves a refusal to give value to
emotional relationships with the world. Actually, Solaris might be read
as depicting exactly this state of affairs, since the Solarists, as soon as they
encounter the alien planet, are suddenly brought face to face with the emotional
lives they have repressed. You seem to have left this theme behind—so much so
that your Golem dispassionately dismisses love. Is this lack of amor in
your work a conscious strategy?

Lem: Love
is a matter of individuals. It is the fulfillment of the human psyche's
expectations. An individual is able to feel love towards only a small number of
the closest persons, be it erotic love, parental, or other—for example,
religiously inspired. In my private life, this emotion plays perhaps the main
role. But one cannot really love humanity. It is impossible even to get to know
all coexisting persons. So put, "love of humanity" is a pure
abstraction, entirely impotent in the face of the world's dramatic problems.
This is why making love the subject of a book is tantamount to closing one's
eyes to the problems of the world, and because of this alone, it would hinge on
being escapist. Of course, these are strictly my private convictions. I do not
believe that love can save nations or entire societies. This may be why love has
taken the backseat in my writing.

ICR: In
some ways, you are one of the most modern writers. Your fiction is usually based
on the contemporary scientific problems and paradigms. But in other ways, you
seem to have more affinities with 19th-century writers, what with your citations
from Swinburne, your invocations of Schopenhauer, your Nietzschean problems. Do
you find you admire 19th-century fiction more than 20th-century fiction?

Lem: The
literature of the 20th century has lost its battle, or at least finds itself in
retreat. I can see more and more books in bookstores, yet fewer and fewer ones
that I would like to read. The tales of refugees from totalitarian countries
reduce themselves to an exhaustive catalogue of social and psychological
suffering that such systems treat their citizens to. These books cannot pick
their readers up, and the lessons they teach are not pleasant. One could say
that the job of literature is not primarily to entertain, move, and cheer us up,
but as Conrad said, to "bring the visible world to justice." Well, in
order to bring this world to justice, it is first necessary to understand it
with one's intellect, to appreciate the wealth of its diversity. That, however,
is now impossible, at least for any narrative convention involving plot, the
sort that was crafted into perfection by l9th-century prose. (A fine exemplar,
if not pinnacle, of this sort of prose is Tolstoy's War and Peace, for it
contains both a sweeping historical view and a focus on individual people and groups.) Since I consider this epic
approach no longer feasible today, if only because a microcosm of a few
individuals does nothing to reflect the larger macrocosm of our planet, I aim
instead to create models of the major problems that lie ahead of us, problems
that humanity will have to face right now and in the coming decades.

Perhaps the retreat from the epic form
was unavoidable, but it need not have meant sliding into escapism. I don't
believe that literature should not entertain and humor us, but the goal which it
must never surrender is that of being a medium for the intellectual, the
philosophical, and the reflective (about the human condition). This is why I
hold in contempt the nouveau roman and other assorted exercises of the
avant garde, including whatever tortures human speech is subjected to by the lot
of current experimenters. The writing of little poems for beautifully decorated
fat monthlies like The Missouri Review, where they appear on glossy
paper, is infantile.8 The fact that the mass production of these
little poems never ceases is to me a symptom of the boundless naïveté of their
authors and editors. At any rate, we happen to live in decadent, declining
times, a fact that can be readily seen in contemporary music and art. It is
impossible to envision either one in the 21st century, because "everything
has been tried already." Not knowing what is ahead, I write in order to
find out a little about it.

P.S.
Quite a lot of these questions, like many of the ones I have been receiving for
the past 30 years, are based on a tacit assumption that my knowledge and
understanding of my texts' problematic, or how they come to be, or where they
belong in the scheme of things, is better than the corresponding notions of my
interlocutors; in fact, that it is definitive. In reality, while I do have some
knowledge, it is not the sort of knowledge that a press correspondent possesses
when relating the course of a game, but rather the knowledge of an observer at a
printer, who sees the newspapers as they are being printed up. My answers may
lead to entirely false conclusions: say, that before writing anything I spent
time considering its problematic—say, that before writing Solaris, I
intended to write about the futile attempts of human contact with an alien
phenomenon, attempts that end in a spectacular crash of anthropocentrism after
the depiction of many adventures and sufferings of the protagonists. Such was
not the case: I didn't know anything at first, not even that I would put some
eerie ocean on that planet. When I write, the process of writing has nothing in
common with building a house, a bottom-up activity based on a top-down design
(involving architects, investors, builders, and workers). Both the structure of
the plot and the adventures of the characters come into being as I write. The
initial state of the book is but a nebulous, extremely loose bunch of ideas. The
final state—after the writing is done—is still a nebulous, rather loose
bunch of ideas, albeit markedly less nebulous and less loose. Nevertheless, this
uncertainty never totally shrinks away. For example, even then, I have no clue
as to the worth of the new work. I do not know how it will be read and
understood by its various readers, whether they will be bored or thrilled.
Usually, all my books are first read by my wife, and very often I have gone
along with her (highly critical) remarks. It has also often happened that I
would not agree with her: for example, when she considered my descriptions of
the library in Solaris as spurious. In other works, occasionally I had an
inner certitude that the text had to remain in its initial form. I cannot
explain that feeling and whence it comes.

What may be even more surprising (if
not downright paradoxical sounding), this was the way in which I wrote my
discursive prose as well: no projects, no blueprints. If a priori plans
were needed, it often turned out they weren't kept. It was as though I was
carried away by the current of my thought as I was writing the text—the sort
of thing that happens to white water rafters: keeping the course and not really
managing to do so. Basically, I wrote by trial and error, and since I never
cross out anything, instead throwing away in its entirety what does not please
me, I see myself as a high-jumper, making attempts at a height, one after
another, each a contained procedure, including the initial run. It is impossible
to pause in the air over the crossbar in order to make an adjustment.

1 usually write both
"horizontally" and "vertically." That is, the initial linear
plot picks up new ideas, thus widening. Then I have to make over entire
chapters, or more. Often, when I am having trouble striking the right tone or
keeping the style I want, I start "randomly," aware that in the final
tally I can get rid of the beginning altogether or replace it with some other. I
did that with The Scene of the Crime, where the first chapter had over
ten variants. I threw them all out and wrote "In Switzerland" as its
first chapter—admittedly, when the book wasn't completed yet, but when I had
already grasped all of it. The same applies to the serious/grotesque modal axis
(and similar choices). A modality such as that comes to be during the process of
writing, and I have often switched after making an initial choice, like a
composer switching to a different key.

Eventually, I learned a lot from
myself. For example, I have on occasion inadvertently included a reflexive
microcosm within a work. In The Investigation, the strange phenomena
behind the wall of Gregory's house are reflexive microcosms of the entire plot.
Similarly, Solaris contains many such items (and they often contradict
one another)—e.g., the library scene I mentioned before. Therefore, when it
came to writing Fiasco, I deliberately inserted into the book a fantasy
about an expedition for strange African ants (in the chapter called
"Crystal Ball"), because its peculiar problem turns out to be
insoluble—in a way similar to the climax of Fiasco.

As for the
"fantastic/technological" or "scientific" ideas, the ones I
regard as unrealizable have found their place in my grotesque, satiric, and
humorous writings. On the other hand, novels such as Solaris, Eden, The
Invincible, Fiasco, Katar [translated into English as Chain of Chance]
and the "serious" ones contain none. I have avoided like the plague
the problematic of "time travel," "travel with infinite
speed," ESP, psychokinesis, et cetera, for the very simple reason
that I don't believe that they can come about. Similarly, "flying
saucers" show up exclusively in my satire.

Gradually, however, in the 1960s, I
started to synthesize the serious with the grotesque in the same works. The
Futurological Congress is a depressing tale, but told funnily—i.e., with
black humor. An even more thorough mix is found in The Scene of the Crime, and
there, striking the correct balance was a big effort for me. And I consider the
21st Journey Ijon Tichy (with the robot-monks) to be one of my most "teleologically"
serious works, one that I personally attach great importance to. It is, in a
way, a very farsighted "futurology of religious faith" set in a heyday
of technologies that allow thinking creatures to accomplish absolutely
everything that Nature can accomplish and, furthermore, everything that is
potentially possible, but which Nature does not realize directly. (Nature does
not directly realize typewriters.) I always wondered why the critics never paid
much attention or gave much interpretation to that work.

I consider the exercise of taxonomizing
(classifications, genealogies) in literature to be a harmful brand of scholastic
activity (if it is meant to tell us how to pigeonhole a work), because the most
interesting issues happen to be located on the borders of classes, especially
the ones we consider sterile (like mules!). That is, it may appear that certain
literary species are not to be crossbred, but I benefited greatly from such
crossbreeding. I hybridized cybernetics and quantum mechanics, impregnating them
with fairy-tale schemes. I mixed kitchen scripts with rocket tales in Tichy's
adventures. (I have yet to come across an SF account of an astronaut with a
stomach ache, or the specter of a stuffed up toilet—which as we know, was a
major problem of the space shuttle.)

As I have written in my theoretical
books, the conventionality of youth adventure stories (as in Verne) does not
permit the gentle travellers to attend to their physiological needs. Such
trifles are left out as non-existent. In realistic prose—as in Tolstoy, for
example—while there may be no "toilet scenes," we, the readers,
understand perfectly well that the author may leave out such matters
because Karenina and Vronsky were in apartments, and the fact that they went to
the bathroom is of no consequence, and that fact alone suffices to account for
Tolstoy's silence on this matter. However, when men (or women) are sent into the
Cosmos, or even to the Moon, they do not leave behind those parts of the anatomy
used for passing stool and urine, as they do not leave behind the necessities of
drinking, eating, and breathing. A fortiori, the unfortunate
unsuitability of the human body-form for cosmic travel should at least be
acknowledged in SF and such, if this stuff doesn't want to be merely tales from The
1001 Nights. After all, the real astronauts had to grapple with shaving and
menstruation on their way into orbit. SF in the US circa the 1950s was
incredibly prudish. In the matters mentioned above, human physiology and sex,
and also in regard to religious faith, it sported many taboos, and only when the
world outside SF spilled over these barriers did SF run wild (for only a
short while, fortunately), lurching into a "cosmic pornography" (Jose
Farmer, for example, from one extreme to another, but never in the middle.

The above considerations of "peepee
and caca" are, of course, the bare minimum of realism. I know them well
from personal experience, because when traveling in 1946 during the postwar
resettlement from Lvov to Cracow—in rail boxcars—both ladies and gentlemen,
although they were mightily embarrassed at first, had to take care of their
bodily needs by extending their behinds through the doors held ajar, or to
attempt the same right next to the temporarily halted train and be ready to
board in a hurry in case it moved on. Well, this necessity of
"physiological exhibition" made the distance between the passengers
vanish in a jiffy....

And, as far as limiting criteria of
introducing in one's serious writing pseudo-realistic, non-existent machines,
technologies, and effects, I think that overall I am in this regard a cautious,
restrained conservative. After all, in my writing of some quarter of a century
ago, I spoke of the emergence of genetic engineering, continuous increase of
computer power, and molecular computing as events far in the future, certainly
the future that I would not live to see. Similarly, with my "embrion,"
a fetus carried by two women in turn (see "Professor A. Donda" from The
Star Diaries),9 entailing the notion of fetal transfer; or with
the freezing of sperm; or with making gene exchanges in the genotype (Science
Fiction and Futurology)--of these notions are now more or less state of the
art. It is most peculiar that when the conclusion of Peace on Earth led
me to the concept of computer programs acting as malignant viruses or cancers,
and when I settled on that ending even though it seemed to me overly fantastic
(that is, taken from thin air, as it were—not deserving of inclusion even in
a satire), I happened to pick up a copy of Newsweek about the so-called
Soft Wars or Core Wars, and then a large piece in Scientific American on
the same topic. No reader of Peace on Earth will think, I suppose, that
the author thought these things up before learning of their real status, that
the author did not use technical literature but instead thought along the lines
of an analogy between computer/program and phenotype/genotype. Yet when writing Peace
on Earth, I did not even have the help of accurate information on AIDS: the
emergence of a never heretofore encountered virus which exploits the dense
population of our planet, promiscuity, and the many available communication
links responsible for transporting local germs to lands far and wide.

I took circumstance and change
to be the two factors charting the changing ways of the world. All the
politicians and columnists taking up the issue of Star Wars do not seem to
realize that ever since technological evolution began its acceleration, no
particular stage of it (in energy management, in mining, in distribution of
goods, in economics, in production for military and consumer purposes, in
astronautics) is subject to freezing, to permanence. Each such stage is
necessarily a passing one, and changes trigger changes (it's a bootstrapping
process, feeding on itself). These considerations happen to apply across the
board to all disciplines. The dying of forests, the acid rains, the polluting of
water sources, pollution-triggered climate changes, etc., will only intensify,
as will the mass starvations of the Third World, because no local relief action
will overturn the general trend. It is this type of implication that is hidden
below the humorous surface of The Futurological Congress, which now reads
rather strangely for me, for it feels much less fantastic (and thus, less
entertaining) than when I wrote it.

Similarly, many ideas contained in Summa
Technologiae are about to be realized. Of course, this realization is not exactly
the same as I foresaw it (it would be a miracle if everything I wrote came
about exactly as I predicted). This is why that book, which in 1964 appeared
chock full of fairy tales intermingled with scientific "realia," may
be considered dated in places: after all, it talks about what shall be, whereas
in places it already is. Those passages must now appear to have been written
about the contemporary state of things, for no one pays attention to when it was
written. (I wrote it in 1962_63, but it came out a year later, as Polish
printers acted slow as molasses; today, things creep even slower, one has to
wait 2-3 years for an edition.) I think that the idea of making a roster of my
published ideas in order to compare them with the calendarium of actual
scientific and technological progress would be an interesting exercise. In
computer science, Dr Gerhard Vowe has attempted just that.10

The above remarks pertain to my
informational sources, and to my "grammar of concept-formation." It is
not a closed phenomenon, stacked with tidbits of information, but rather a
potential for the interception of and further thinking about certain problems
and notions. My "futurological news" cannot be thus readily scooped
out of my head, for they are there (if they are there) in a latent, potential
state. They are mere rumors. My conclusions are extracted from them only through
the course of my work.

P.P.S. I
think it would be of benefit to present briefly my attitude towards criticism.
For 20 years following the publication of my first book, I was treated in Poland
as a writer of youth-oriented adventure stories, essentially a Grade B writer.
Poland never really did "discover" me. The respect came with the
echoes of my foreign successes. In fact, it wasn't what was written by the
foreign critics that made the difference. Rather, it was the fact that I started
accumulating all the translations: some 30-odd languages and millions of copies
sold.

There were many causes for this state
of affairs. The critics tend to be humanists (Polonists). The scientific
paradigm is Chinese to them. Furthermore, SF in Poland (and beyond) has been
regarded as a cheap genre. In fact, it came to the point that several years ago,
when I was already established in the world and in Poland, one of our leading
critics, a professor of Polish literature and a dean at the Jagellonian
University (Jan B16nski) confided to my wife that he could write something about
me as a man, but about my books, nothing. He even apologized to me that he
couldn't include my output in some colloquium he gave in France about Polish
literature, because he was unable to identify my spot on the map of
Polish literature, contemporary or past, among such-and-such an avant garde
school or movement or what_not. Somehow I was "someplace else." On the
other hand, Jerzy Jarzebski, a Gombrowicz scholar, did write a 200-page
monograph about me (it is to appear in German next year, published by Insel
Verlag of West Germany). And although he displayed a certain acumen in his
analysis, he was unable to perceive my work from the "epistemological
angle," for it is a side ingrained in biology, which is rather alien to
him. Nota bene, Jarzebski, acquainted with my "empirical theory of
literature," The Philosophy of Chance, and "Markiz w
Grafie"11 (in the last of which I applied game theory to a
genological analysis of De Sade) did attempt to apply the method I proposed (the
game theory's structure, the structure of dynamic conflicts, and not the static
structures of the classic structuralism), even calling his book Gra w
Gombrowicza ["The Gombrowicz Game"], but I can tell from the
content that he has no idea of what game theory is all about, that the notions
of saddle-like payoff function and such, zero-sum and non-zero-sum games, etc.
are completely foreign to him.

In the final tally, there never was
inspiring criticism as far as I am concerned. There still isn't any. I have been
given, however, much friendly advice to the effect that I should write (at last)
a "normal contemporary novel," which could be profitably critiqued.
This strikes me as analogous to advising a contemporary composer to compose
"like Beethoven," because his or her own music is only so much noise.

Several of my belletristic titles did
succeed in attracting accurate critics overseas (one of the first was T.
Solotaroff a few years back), but since a great deal of my writing has never
been translated into the languages accessible to the critics, the reviews have
always struck me as tiny fragmentary snapshots of a larger panorama.
Particularly the following (often entertaining) mistakes have been made by my
foreign critics: (1) I have been accused of being familiar with the output of
authors whom I have never read, as well as adherence to philosophical systems of
which I have not the least idea. This alleged knowledge on my part was then
taken as a starting point of the review. (2) Certain conclusions have been
reached through the analysis of idioms and expressions which are artifacts of
translations and never appeared in the Polish original. (3)1 always seem to end
up guilty of polemics, be it with religious faith, or with Bentham (with
utilitarianism), or with causal determinism; or since there is a lot of space
given to theology (and theodicy) in my work, then necessarily I must be
religious; and if my novels happen to have many interpretations, then there must
be one that is authoritative, correct, and final! (Better yet, 1, the author, know
perfectly well which is that correct interpretation, for it was my guiding
principle during the course of writing: perhaps I did not succeed in rendering
my intentions well, but I do know them well.)

This latter point is 100% wrong, at
least in my case. I do not commence my belletristic endeavors with abstract
philosophical contemplations. I write that and about that which surprises and
intrigues me, and does so in the form of certain fuzzy ideas.

NOTES

1. The philosophical journal Lem is
referring to is Studia Filozofczne.

2. Wizja Lokalna (The Scene of the
Crime) is a long Ijon Tichy novel (313pp. in Polish), which appeared in 1982
from Lem's usual Polish publisher, Wydawnictwo Literackie. A Japanese
translation appeared in 1983, and German editions in 1985 (the same translation
was used in East and West Germany). No other translations are currently under
contract.

3. "Provocation," a review of
a non-existent book (a two-volume German treatise, The Genocide, by Horst
Aspernicus) appeared in two issues (7 and 8, July and August 1980) of the Polish
monthly Odra, and in 1981 as a German book from Suhrkamp in Frankfurt. A
Russian translation will appear in a Russian exile magazine published by Rafail
Nudelman in Israel. No other translations are under contract. "One Human
Minute" and ``The World as Holocaust" appeared first in 1983 in
translation from Suhrkamp in Germany; along with 'Weapons Systems of the 21st
Century," they form "Lem's Library of the 21st Century." All
three are in a volume, One lluman Minute, just published by Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich.

4. "Edukacja Cyfrania" is a
long Cyberiad story, first published in 1976 (by Widawnictwo Literackie)
in the volume Maska; no full translations have appeared (although it is
under contract in West Germany); partial translations have appeared in both East
and West Germany.

5. Fiasco is as yet unpublished
in Poland or anywhere else, but it is forthcoming in Sweden, France, both
Germanies, Poland, and the US.

6. Peace on Earth, unpublished
in Polish, was first published in 1985 in Swedish (Fred pa Jorden, published
by Brombergs), and is forthcoming in German, French, and Finnish; it is under
contract to HBJ, and to Andre Deutsch in England.

7. See note 2.

8. Lem is in error here. The
Missouri Review is not a monthly; it appears three times a year.

9. "Professor A. Donda"
appeared in Maska; it is a "Reminiscence of Ijon Tichy"
accidentally left out of the HBJ volume Memoirs of a Space Traveler.